News

The recently released Android++ in closed beta enables you to build Android apps using Visual Studio with support for zero
hardware restrictions, MSBuild, LLVM, GCC in addition to integrated GDB debugging.

On each day of the 3-day conference at the inviting environs offered at the Hyatt there was a jam-packed schedule of speakers, exhibits and activities that made for some difficult decisions as to which tracks and what happening to attend.

Oracle have released videos and slides from the 2013 JVM Language Summit, which saw uses of the JVM from the biggest data to the smallest mobiles, and future performance advances in the JVM runtime. Read on to find out more about what was covered.

Since the Java 7 Update 40 release, Mission Control and Flight Recorder are shipped with the JDK.
Mission Control is the starting place for monitoring, management and troubleshooting, while Flight Recorder is the facility to collect and evaluate profiling data. Both tools have been available for JRockit and are now finally ported to HotSpot.

Azul Systems and Gil Tene have been named Java Community Process (JCP) Member of the Year at the JavaOne 2013 conference, held last week in San Francisco. The award recognizes the corporate or individual member who has made the most positive impact on the Java community in the past year.

Following an announcement of their partnership in July this year, Azul Systems and Microsoft Open Technologies have now release a GA version of Zulu for Windows Azure. Licensed under the terms of the GPLv2 open source license with the ClassPath Exception, Zulu is an OpenJDK-based JVM for Windows Server on the Windows Azure Cloud.

Gavin King, leader of the Ceylon project, has announced the availability of M6 release, which has also been tagged as Ceylon 1.0 Beta, the language been considered feature complete. This release includes complete language specification, a command-line toolset – compilers for JVM and JavaScript VMs, documentation compiler –, an SDK, and an Eclipse-based IDE.

Charles Nutter, one of the lead developers of JRuby, announced the release of version 9000 (9K) in 2014. The new release targets the same feature set as Ruby MRI 2.0 and possibly 2.1 as well. Better performance, concurrency support and overall availability and portability provided by the use of the JVM can make this version suitable for production systems.

FreeBSD 10 has had its first alpha release, bringing with it a long planned for change to switch to the Clang compiler instead of GCC on platforms where it is available. It is also the first FreeBSD release to run on the Raspberry Pi. Read on to find out more about the decision to switch compilers, and what it means for users.

For many of us Twitter has become an essential communications utility. Since experiencing scalability problems in 2010, Twitter has moved to a loosely coupled service oriented architecture based on the JVM, allowing it new levels of scalability and feature agility. Twitter engineering recently reported a new record throughput and took time out to describe their new architecture.